Legal
and illegal drugs, such as opium-laced cigarettes, are available easily
and plentifully in Afghanistan. Substance abuse in the country is
increasing strongly and the number of drug addicts is rising.

By April WittTHE WASHINGTON POST

JATA, Afghanistan, July 10 — The
village mullah and his superior are smeared with fresh opium sap. It is
harvest time, and the holy men are laboring in their poppy field,
breaking the laws of Islam and Afghanistan to ease their poverty.

AS THE day wanes, they wait, fingers aching, for the ubiquitous
young men who cross the countryside on shiny new motorbikes, buying up
the deadly harvest reaped by local farmers.
“Of course it bothers me,” said Mohammad Sarwar, 49, the
mawlawi, or authority on Islamic teachings, at the mosque in this tiny
northeastern village. “But we have to cultivate it in the current
situation where we’ve had to borrow money, sell household items and
don’t have enough to eat. This is an emergency.”
The drug trade in Afghanistan is growing more pervasive,
powerful and organized, its corrupting reach extending to all aspects
of society, according to dozens of interviews with international and
Afghan anti-narcotics workers, police, poppy farmers, government
officials and their critics.
Already the world’s largest opium producer last year,
Afghanistan appears poised to produce another bumper crop. In rural
areas where wheat has historically been the dominant crop, fields of
brilliant red, pink and white poppies are proliferating. Many poor
farmers, who complain that the Afghan government and other countries
have failed to ease their economic woes through legal means, say that
they are growing illegal opium poppies for the first time.

Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani called the drug trade “a threat to
democracy” as Afghanistan tries to prepare for elections next year.
“Elections are expensive propositions,” he said in an interview last
week in the capital, Kabul. “The liquid funds from drugs, in the
absence of solid institutions, could corrupt voting practices and turn
them into a nightmare instead of a realization of the public will.”
Analysts and observers say that many well-placed politicians,
police officers and military officials already are profiting from the
drug trade. A high-ranking anti-narcotics official recalled discussing
the problem with a U.S. general, who “asked me if I could give him a
list of these officials who were involved. I told him it would be
easier if I listed officials who weren’t involved. That would be a
shorter list.”
While opium poppy has been cultivated in Afghanistan since the
18th century, the drug trade did not flourish here until recent
decades, according to a U.N. study published this year.
After the 1979 Soviet invasion spawned a decade-long guerrilla
war fought by U.S.-backed Islamic resistance forces, the Afghan
government lost control of the rugged hinterlands and never fully
regained it. Through the Soviet war and the years of conflict that
followed, almost every faction funded itself at least partly through
the drug trade.
The seemingly endless fighting also destroyed Afghanistan’s
agricultural infrastructure — in particular the irrigation canals
essential for nurturing crops and the roads needed to get them to
market. Poor farmers increasingly turned to opium to support their
families. The opium poppy requires less water than wheat, and the
valuable sap it produces could be sold quickly to dealers in the fields
or kept indefinitely on a farmhouse shelf and used as barter whenever a
family needed something from the local bazaar.
In 1999, Afghanistan produced its largest opium crop to date:
5,060 tons, from about 224,000 acres of land, according to the U.N.
Office on Drugs and Crime. The following year, the Taliban, the radical
Islamic movement that ruled most of the country, banned cultivation of
the opium poppy, but not its trade. As a result, the price of opium
soared and the Taliban reportedly profited hugely from selling
stockpiles of the narcotic. Poppy cultivation plummeted, except in
Badakhshan province and other areas not under Taliban control.
After the U.S.-led military campaign in late 2001 toppled the
Taliban, the new president, Hamid Karzai, banned every aspect of the
drug trade. Governors in some traditional poppy-growing provinces
cooperated with aggressive eradication programs, but the poppy has
spread rapidly in many areas where it traditionally had not been grown.
As they do every year, U.N. surveyors are trying to quantify
this year’s poppy harvest using satellite photography and field
inspections. Their findings will be announced in September, but some
surveyors say anecdotal evidence already points to an extraordinary
year.
In one corner of the Borek district in Badakhshan, for example,
Said Amir, a U.N. surveyor, said that “last year I could not find one
poppy there. This year it’s on about 40 percent of the land.”
There is broad agreement among anti-drug workers, aid agencies
and poppy farmers that efforts last year to stop cultivation by paying
farmers to eradicate their poppy fields only encouraged more to grow it
this year in the hope that they would be paid again. And because aid
groups have made food more plentiful, some farmers are feeding their
families donated wheat, leaving their fields free for planting poppy.
In the northern province of Faryab, for example, World Food
Progam workers said they noticed the greatest poppy cultivation in
areas where they distributed wheat most heavily. In the remote Garziwan
district, accessible only by donkey or horse, villagers who used to
travel to pick up donated wheat told aid workers that they could not be
bothered. Newly flush with opium profits, they wanted the wheat only if
aid workers delivered it to them.

‘EVERYBODY IS AFFECTED’
In Badakhshan province, known for the tenacity of its opposition
to the Taliban and the beauty of its mountainous terrain, the drug
trade is exerting a gravitational pull on the local economy and power
structure.
The increase of poppy fields and drug labs has driven the price
of a day’s labor from about $3 to $10 — beyond the reach of farmers
tending low-priced legal crops, but affordable for poppy growers.

‘Almost all the U.N. projects have stopped because there is no labor. People are working with the poppy.’
— MOHAMMAD HAKIMU.N. mission in Afghanistan

The rising labor costs have also stalled road and bridge
projects and other reconstruction efforts that are desperately needed
in the province, which is poor even by Afghan standards, said Mohammad
Hakim, 30, political officer for the Badakhshan office of the U.N.
mission in Afghanistan.
“Almost all the U.N. projects have stopped because there is no
labor,” he said. “People are working with the poppy. Roof construction,
school projects — all stopped. Everybody is affected.”
Last year, Hakim said, several militia commanders scattered
throughout the province tried to halt the spread of poppy cultivation
and drug-processing labs. “This year, there was only one,” he said.
“Next year, maybe none. In some districts, the commander is the owner
of the factory. The people who are getting involved are getting
powerful.”
Cmdr. Fazel Ahmad Nazari, head of criminal investigations for
the Badakhshan police, said: “Day by day, it’s growing more organized.
If it keeps going like this we won’t be able to combat it, ever.”
As the drug trade spreads, law enforcement efforts to combat it remain rudimentary.
The fledgling national government’s new Counter-Narcotics
Department is still struggling to establish itself. Kabul-based
anti-narcotics police units are largely in the planning and training
stage. No one is seriously investigating official drug corruption. “We
don’t have the capacity yet,” said Mirwais Yasini, director general of
the Counter Narcotics Department.
In the eastern province of Logar, convoys of trucks loaded with
drugs and guarded by men armed with semi-automatic weapons and
rocket-propelled grenades travel toward the Pakistani border at least
two or three times a week. The police chief says that his men don’t
have the firepower to stop them and that some well-armed militiamen are
in league with the smugglers.
“It’s out of our control,” said Maj. Gen. Noor Mohammad Pakteen,
who has been a law enforcement officer for 36 of his 59 years. “The
drug mafia is getting worse daily. When nobody will help us, we can’t
do anything. . . . I’m so frustrated, actually, I’m ready to leave my
job.”
Police across the country not only do not have the might to
confront well-armed drug smugglers, they also lack such basics as cars,
telephones and radios.
In mountainous Badakhshan, the police have just one vehicle, a
pickup truck. When police at headquarters in the provincial capital,
Faizabad, receive a tip about a smuggling operation in a far-flung
district, Nazari often has to send an officer on foot. A round trip can
take a month and leave an officer in trouble with no way to call for
help.
“These mafia who are very active in Afghanistan have
everything,” Nazari said. “They have motorbikes, pistols, mobile phones
and tight communication. The police who are trying to combat those
smugglers have nothing.”
Police in Badakhshan are supposed to receive a monthly salary of
up to 1,500 afghanis — about $30. But the national government has
failed to pay them for months at a time.
A demoralized police officer is ripe for bribes. “For $100,
he’ll be hired,” Nazari said. “The drug smugglers will give him some
money and tell him that even though he knows about a laboratory he
should say that he doesn’t. It’s happened lots of times.”

FEW CONDEMNATIONS
The elder of Boymalasi village — a doctor — last year criticized
the spread of poppy fields throughout the Argo district of Badakhshan.
This year he’s growing poppy.
“I feel 100 percent terrible about it,” said Hasamudin, 44,
looking down at his feet. “There is no rule in Afghanistan. If there
was rule, the people could not do this. They would have to obey the
orders of the government. There is no government in Afghanistan, just
the name of government. Who will come and ask us about our crime?”
Ghulam Mohammad, 60, expressed no such misgivings. He has lived
most of his life in a one-room house in Argo, farming wheat on a small
plot to support his family of 10. “We never had a good life,” he said.
This season he and his son-in-law Safar planted poppy. Mohammad
borrowed against anticipated profits of $1,800 — 30 times more than he
ever earned selling wheat, he said — to add three rooms to his house.
Nobody, not even the local mullahs, is telling the wizened
farmer and his neighbors that what they are doing is wrong. In fact,
they laugh at the notion.
“In my village, the mullah himself has cultivated it,” Safar, 45, said.
“All the mullahs are cultivating it,” Mohammad said.
Along the banks of the nearby Kokcha River, Mullah Abdul Rashid
of the Jata mosque is indeed laboring in his poppy field. Working with
his business partner — Sarwar, the mosque’s mawlawi — the mullah deftly
slices one ovoid poppy pod after another to release opium sap. All 80
families in their village are growing poppy this year, the clerics
said.
“Of course we believe that growing this poppy will have a very
bad moral effect on the people of Badakhshan,” the mullah, 36, said.
“In the future, we hope it will be eradicated. Now, it’s everywhere
because the people need it to survive.
“I won’t allow anyone to eradicate this field,” the mullah said.
“In the future, if my situation got better, I’ll destroy it myself.”